Caring But Also Careworn

By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS

Toward the end of Meg Federico's memoir of caring for her elderly mother, Addie, and her mother's equally aged second husband, Walter, the author records an unexpected tender moment. "Tell me," says the dying Addie, who has lost the ability to walk unaided, to sip a cocktail freely or even to change her clothes: "How I can live when I can't do a thing?" Ms. Federico has no ready answer: "What could I say? How does one live when the end of life is in sight, but hasn't yet arrived?"

With the oldest contingent of the country's 76 million baby boomers approaching retirement age and countless younger boomers now caring for their own parents, Ms. Federico's question slips easily from the rhetorical to the practical. One could do worse than to consult "Welcome to the Departure Lounge" for guidance, or at least for comic relief. It is a wisecracking and yet often warm-hearted account of Addie and Walter's final years, which are more gloomy than golden as the pair battles dementia and Alzheimer's.

For Ms. Federico, a humor columnist for the National Post in Canada, wit is a survival tool. It enables her to endure the sometimes overwhelming demands of shuttling every few weeks between Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she lives with her own family, and the suburban New Jersey house -- she calls it the Departure Lounge -- where Addie and Walter are tended to by a team of home-care aides. "There had never been anything easy about Mom," Ms. Federico writes. "She had a lot in common with God, a confused, vengeful, Old Testament God who'd read Freud." The story at times can be grim or even sickening -- old age isn't pretty -- but the author's wit also eases the experience considerably for readers, especially those who know the burdens of looking after aging parents or are just plain worried about what the gray future holds for them.

Much like an earlier book about dying, Nancy Cobb's "In Lieu of Flowers," this memoir is written for the living, the ones left behind, but -- a relief -- there is no preaching, no mawkish how-to steps. And Ms. Federico does not gloss over the sobering reality of addled old age, not when Walter mail-orders sexual devices and creams and then nightly ambushes her frail mother; not when Addie, in one of her less than lucid moments, refers to a black health-care worker as "the new slave."

For many readers familiar with the challenges of caring for elderly relatives, the resonances of "The Departure Lounge" will have a certain limit. Addie and Walter are wealthy enough -- Addie has inherited money from her first husband's chemical business and Walter moves in the same upper-crust golf-club circles -- that they can afford a revolving crew of caregivers. In other words, no moving into an assisted-living facility or nursing home for this couple. The aides -- their rivalries, clashes and relationships with Addie and Walter -- help propel the story just as they help the old folks with feeding, washing and dressing. The aides also help themselves: to jewelry worth $100,000 hidden clumsily in a closet.

In an indication of how detached Ms. Federico's experience is from that of millions who've agonized over how to pay for a parent's care, the loss of the jewelry is not a really a disaster. At one point, the annual budget for Addie and Walter's care is $400,000. When Walter inadvertently makes a bank withdrawal for $1,600 instead of $160, bouncing checks don't trail behind him. When Addie loses a $25,000 deposit trying to redecorate the TV room, it is just one more inconvenience that comes with keeping aging parents at home.

But Ms. Federico's tales do entertain. And the inexorable approach of death opens the Departure Lounge's doors to everyman. After all, money may buy extra hands to keep you clean and fed, but it can't buy back your youth or even clear-minded middle age. Ms. Federico sits patiently with Addie for hours, flipping through photo albums, trying futilely to spark memories lost forever to her mother. In a familiar inversion, the author becomes a parent to her parent, cooking, deciding when Addie can consume alcohol, cleaning up her messes, struggling to forgive this iron-willed woman for the trespasses inflicted on her as a child.

In the meantime, as a wife and mother of three adolescent kids, Ms. Federico can't prevent the chaos of the house in New Jersey from infiltrating her life a thousand miles away in Canada. Shopping in Halifax, she finds herself buying Depends adult diapers, thinking she is in New Jersey. "My family was enjoying those fleeting years between Huggies and geriatric briefs," she muses. "They could all make it to the potty on their own. You just don't know enough, at the time, to appreciate it."

It would have been good to hear more about the side of Ms. Federico's life in Halifax as a counterpoint to the downward spiral of Addie and Walter but also simply as a way of gauging what she was giving up for her frequent forays south. Her husband, Rob, hovers in the background, never really materializing except as someone constantly irritated by his wife's departures for the Departure Lounge. After one of the couple's screaming matches, Ms. Federico writes: "You know your mental health is precarious when you wish your husband and your mother would both die, preferably simultaneously, for your own peace of mind and convenience." But behind sarcasm's shield surely lurks some universal pain that we might glimpse if the author turned her sharp lens inward a bit more.

Still, Ms. Federico's focus in "Welcome to the Departure Lounge" on the decline of her mother and her stepfather, to the exclusion of her family, is understandable -- reflecting just how consuming the events in New Jersey were in real life. Ms. Federico shows an admirable devotion to easing the final days of a woman who stirs decidedly mixed feelings in her. The reader can't but wonder: Will I rise to the occasion so well? And then comes another, more urgent question: Will my children?

Ms. Bounds is a columnist with the Journal and author of the memoir "Little Chapel on the River: A Pub, a Town and the Search for What Matters Most."